Travails on Twitter for China’s State Broadcaster

Amid a sustained government crackdown on online rumors, China’s state broadcaster is getting a bit of stick for an “unauthorized” tweet about ex-security chief Zhou Yongkang.

The offending post, which managed to escape briefly onto the Twitter stream of China Central Television’s English-language service on Monday before being quickly erased, went like this: “President Xi Jinping has set up a special unit to investigate corruption allegations against the retired leader Zhou Yongkang.”

Twitter

A screenshot shows the statement CCTV released through Twitter following an “unauthorized” tweet about an investigation into former Chinese security czar Zhou Yongkang

That raised a few eyebrows among followers of CCTV, the official television outlet that is generally assumed to know where the fine lines of discretion begin and the need for information stops. While some saw the message as a leak, others speculated it might be the work of an incautious, or intemperate, intern – the standard explanation from official Chinese agencies when messages go awry online.

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But according to CCTV, it wasn’t a mistake at all. On Tuesday, the broadcaster released the following statement: “The CCTVNews Twitter account was targeted on Oct 21st and used illegally to post incorrect information copied from other sources. The unauthorized information was deleted,” it said.

Aside from suggesting that CCTV editors thought it was OK to post incorrect information as long it was done legally, the statement also implied (without quite saying it) that the broadcaster’s Twitter feed had been hacked. That explanation met with derisive responses from Chinese users of Twitter, some of whom wondered whether any hacker with access to that account would have the restraint to send only one controversial tweet.

The statement also didn’t bother to mention that the “incorrect” and “unauthorized” information bore a striking resemblance to the headline on a South China Morning Post story that said that Mr. Xi had set up a special group to investigate Mr. Zhou – a close ally of former party highflyer Bo Xilai, now serving a life sentence for corruption and abuse of power. Unconfirmed rumors of an investigation into Mr. Zhou have been circulating ever since Beijing launched anticorruption inquiries into the oil sector that touched a number of his associates.

Contacted by email and phone, CCTV’s foreign affairs bureau said it had no immediate comment but that it would look into the matter.

The kerfuffle comes at a time when the U.S. and China are trading allegations and counter-allegations of hacking and cyber espionage. The back-and-forth has sometimes looked like a long rally at a Grand Slam tennis event.

It also appears just as Chinese authorities are trying to exert more control over the country’s own social media platforms, which they have portrayed as rife with rumor and libel. In early September, China’s highest court expanded the interpretation of the criminal law to make social-media users subject to defamation charges and possibly prison terms if they spread rumors or post slanderous content that attracts more than 5,000 hits or is reposted more than 500 times. Many microbloggers have decried this as an effort to silence critics online.

Twitter, which is blocked in China but accessible through circumvention software, remains outside the purvey of China’s propaganda overseers. But that of course raises the question of what China’s official broadcaster is doing on Twitter in the first place.

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